Starlight Enclave
Page 46
She saw Entreri similarly bucking his steed, ice flying, flames snorting and spouting with every breath and every slamming hoof.
And she saw, most of all, that giant silhouette before the huge ice circle far away.
As if mesmerized, the stunned priestess watched the huge curving blade lift, then suddenly sweep out and back, slamming the sheet of ice, which broke apart and fell crashing from the wall.
And in came the wind, and even with her magical protection, Catti-brie could feel the sudden bite of cold, and the sting of a hurricane of sleet, blasting through the vast chamber.
She couldn’t remember her spells, couldn’t remember her name.
She watched in horror a hail of ice pellets drive at Zak, then form a small tornado swirling about him. He snapped his whip furiously for a short moment, but then his arm wouldn’t move as the ice grasped him. The whip became a blade of flame sparking and hissing against the unrelenting icy barrage.
A stalagmite of ice grew thick around him.
She saw Jarlaxle’s hellsteed, riderless and leaping, and saw Jarlaxle fall to the ground, then through the ground beneath the cyclone.
Farther on, Entreri’s horse was spinning, spinning, lower and lower, as a tornado formed about it. Spinning and spinning and then it was not, for it and its rider became a stalagmite, and then the hellsteed vanished, and the mostly hollow mound crumbled, but reformed, a lump of ice entombing the fallen Artemis Entreri.
And Jarlaxle’s mount was gone, the rogue nowhere to be seen.
Finally, the stunning word let her go, and Catti-brie tried to lift her bow, for what else might she do? But it was useless, for she couldn’t even see the far wall and the smoky slaad giant as the fury of the ice pellets pounded against her. She noted the poor aevendrow and the orc, still trying to rise, but caught again by the frozen tombs, and she heard the increasing roar of angry wind as the pellets began to spin tightly about her.
She dropped Taulmaril to the ground. She tried to remember her spells, her word of recall, to be out of there. But her face was encased and she couldn’t utter a sound. She tried to cover, tried to break free of the frozen mask, tried to grab at anything that might help: her belt, an arrow, her pouch.
But she couldn’t talk, couldn’t cast, and then couldn’t move as she, too, became a stalagmite.
So suddenly had it turned.
So suddenly had their plans shattered.
So suddenly had they lost.
Catti-brie wanted to call out, but she could not. She thought of her loss, of never seeing Drizzt or Brie again, of her foolishness in coming here, to the north and to this place, against the warnings of the aevendrow.
She wanted to see Callidae again, to walk its ways with her husband and their daughter.
But she would not.
She considered one other friend, but couldn’t even utter her name.
Except . . . she didn’t have to.
Flashes kept the aevendrow band moving forward, slowly, slowly, inexorably pulled by their loyalty to these four strangers who had become such friends in so short a time.
They could hear the fury of the fight, the crackles of lightning and the snap of Zak’s whip, a cacophony now fast diminishing.
Then the roar of the wind, thunderous and painful, and one both Galathae and Azzudonna had heard before.
Enough, we must be gone, Galathae’s lifted hands silently screamed to them, and the paladin grabbed Vessi, who was closest to her, and tugged at him to turn back the other way. He resisted until far ahead, they saw a form, large and dark, rushing down the tunnel.
All the aevendrow turned and ran, even Azzudonna, who gave one last glance back for Zak, knowing in her heart that he had fallen.
The warrior wouldn’t have outrun the pursuit in any case, but her hesitation had her at the back of the retreating line and so it was she who felt the heavy collision from behind, throwing her forward and down, rushing at the ground.
Enwrapped, shocked and overcome, she never even felt the impact.
Epilogue
She felt herself leaving her body, her spirit flying up through the glacial ice, up, up, into the air. She saw the lights of Callidae far ahead and below, and lamented the last beautiful glimpse of the home she so loved. She thought of her friends left behind. Thought of her fellow Biancorso soldiers, of the joys and the proud scars, of that last battle and the throw, one guided by pure determination and will—and that, too, seemed to her an out-of-body experience, much akin to this.
Then she was up among the Merry Dancers, shimmering in greens and purples and whites, and she felt as if her spirit was joining in that dance of exultation. The magic swirled and tingled and it was a beautiful thing to her, almost an explanation of cazzcalci’s unexpected turn, of the power nearly fifty thousand voices had lent to that wounded southerner.
Her spirit lifted, higher and higher, up beyond the northern lights, flying fast for the moon and the stars.
Up and up. She saw the curve of Toril, then the whole of the globe, and still she flew, without tether, into the heavens, the Astral Plane.
Callidae was gone, to her great lament.
Her friends were gone.
Biancorso was gone.
She was sure that she had heard the last cheers of cazzcalci.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ilina told Galathae as they began donning their skis. “Don’t be foolish. Azzudonna above all insisted that we follow them. Azzudonna alone hesitated in our retreat when the battle turned.”
“And what was that?” Vessi asked. “It was no slaad, and no cante or n’divi.”
“I think it was the great cat,” Galathae admitted, but shaking her head, for it had happened so very fast and she had caught just a quick glimpse before they were gone. “Catti-brie’s cat.”
“Who was no enemy,” said Ilina. “Is it possible that our Azzudonna . . . ?”
Her voice trailed off and she sniffled a bit, gathered up her poles, and pushed away.
The other four followed, quickly. They skied out of the rift and turned fast, keeping the glacial wall on their right as they sped along, not stopping at all until they came to the next real rift and the encampment where the rest of the expedition waited.
On Galathae’s command, all of them—aevendrow, kurit, orok, and Ulutiun—broke camp immediately and rushed away.
She had lost the southerners.
Now she had lost Azzudonna.
She wasn’t about to risk any more.
Jarlaxle sat in the dark against a magical wall and beneath his great hat, which had turned into a huge, sturdy umbrella at his beckon, the handle set against the floor between his straightened legs. He could feel the weight pressing down upon it, the ice that had flown into this space behind him, the same ice that now encased his outstretched feet, and he could only hope that the umbrella would hold back the press.
Above him, the rumble of the wind gradually died away to nothingness, leaving behind a silence as profound as the darkness and as cold as the ice.
He wasn’t quite sure what had happened. What was he to make of those magical cyclones, the likes of which he had never before seen or heard of?
All he knew was that his friends were gone and lost to him, and that he was alone in a hole, sealed in by a mound of hardening ice, and with hordes of formidable monsters outside.
This wasn’t the way he had planned it.
Jarlaxle never liked when things went the way he hadn’t planned.
Everything came as flashes of light and swirls of darkness for Azzudonna, who felt as if she were swimming through the heavens, circling the world that had been her home, out of control of her movements and unsure if this was death or life or something in between.
She began to plummet, but was not afraid.
She came back into the sky of Toril, and it was light, not night, and below was a land blanketed in snow, with huge trees and towering mountains.
Then a town, a small town, set in a region of fields and forests, and a
grand mansion built on a hill, overlooking all the other structures.
Down she went, plummeting for it, but she wasn’t afraid, not until she neared the roof and kept going!
Right through, but without collision.
A spirit, insubstantial, and then not.
Azzudonna found herself sitting on a wooden floor in a small room with a closed door right before her and a giant black cat standing beside her.
Only then did she understand that it was Guenhwyvar, Catti-brie’s cat, that had taken her on this ride, and that she certainly wasn’t dead and wasn’t a disembodied spirit—at least, not any longer.
Now she was just Azzudonna again, lost and unsure.
The great cat’s ears went back and she gave a long, loud growl.
The aevendrow didn’t know what to do.
The door burst open a few heartbeats later and a human woman appeared, her face going from an expression of surprise to one of abject shock.
She was older than Catti-brie, it seemed, with dark hair, and wearing a woolen dress and a colorful shawl.
Beside Azzudonna, Guenhwyvar faded away to nothingness.
Azzudonna didn’t move. She heard talking in the hall, the voice of a man, but she couldn’t understand the words.
“What is it, Penelope?”
About the Author
Thirty-four years ago, R. A. SALVATORE created the character of Drizzt Do’Urden, the dark elf who has withstood the test of time to stand today as an icon in the fantasy genre. With his work in the Forgotten Realms, the Crimson Shadow, the DemonWars Saga, and other series, Salvatore has sold more than thirty million books worldwide and has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list more than two dozen times. He considers writing to be his personal journey, but still, he’s quite pleased that so many are walking the road beside him! R. A. lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Diane, and their two dogs, Pikel and Dexter. He still plays softball for his team, Clan Battlehammer, and enjoys his weekly DemonWars: Reformation RPG. Salvatore can be found on Facebook at TheRealRASalvatore, on Twitter at @r_a_salvatore, and at RASalvaStore.com.
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Also by R. A. Salvatore
The Legend of Drizzt Books
Homeland
Exile
Sojourn
The Crystal Shard
Streams of Silver
The Halfling’s Gem
The Legacy
Starless Night
Siege of Darkness
Passage to Dawn
The Silent Blade
The Spine of the World
Sea of Swords
Servant of the Shard
Promise of the Witch King
Road of the Patriarch
The Thousand Orcs
The Lone Drow
The Two Swords
The Orc King
The Pirate King
The Ghost King
Gauntlgrym
Neverwinter
Charon’s Claw
The Last Threshold
The Companions
Night of the Hunter
Rise of the King
Vengeance of the Iron Dwarf
Archmage
Maestro
Hero
Timeless
Boundless
Relentless
Saga of the First King
The Highwayman
The Ancient
The Dame
Tales of the Coven
Child of a Mad God
Reckoning of Fallen Gods
Song of the Risen God
Copyright
Wizards of the Coast, its logo, The Legend of Drizzt, Forgotten Realms, and the dragon ampersand are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
starlight enclave. Copyright © 2021 by Wizards of the Coast LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Harper Voyager and design are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers LLC.
first edition
Map courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
Frontispiece art © Aleks Melnik / Shutterstock
Cover illustration by David Palumbo
Cover illustration art direction by Daniel Ketchum
Cover design by AJ Hanneld and Carina Tous
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition AUGUST 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-302979-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-302977-4
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